The City of Ember Themes

It may sound corny, but friendship is like a bright light that can illuminate even the darkest times. Unless you're in The City of Ember, in which case a total power failure leaves everyone strande...

Of the seven deadly sins, greed is one of the most enjoyable—just ask Mayor Cole. No one in The City of Ember is immune to the siren call of greed: some people are greedy for attention or affecti...

Given that The City of Ember is a planned post apocalyptic community under the earth's surface, it makes sense that we only get a few glimpses of the natural world. There are, of course, bugs and d...

Despite the fact that some basic facts of life are different in The City of Ember—no sunlight, no sky, no animals—families remain an important part of people's lives. The key difference is that...

The City of Ember is built on hope—no matter how dismal it seems in Lina and Doon's time. Obviously it took a lot of planning to make the dream of Ember (a refuge for humans in a world careening...

Ah, to be young again. But hopefully not in The City of Ember. Ember's not such a bad place when everything is working and there aren't any shortages, but for an imaginative kid, it's awfully dull....

Ember is a city without a past. Or really, without much past to speak of; what are two hundred years in the lives of cities? Ember is an infant city compared to a place like Rome or Cairo. But Embe...

We've got two kinds of power going on in The City of Ember, and while they couldn't be more different on the surface, the more we dig, the more we realize they're intertwined. First, there's the po...